There is a short passage in Daniel Chandler’s
Semiotics for Beginners (http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html)
which references the matter of identity:
 |
| Chandler |
'Common-sense' suggests that 'I' am a unique
individual with a stable, unified identity and ideas of my own. Semiotics can
help us to realise that such notions are created and maintained by our
engagement with sign systems: our sense of identity is established through
signs. We derive a sense of 'self' from drawing upon conventional, pre-existing
repertoires of signs and codes which we did not ourselves create. We are thus
the subjects of our sign systems rather than being simply instrumental
'users' who are fully in control of them. Whilst we are not determined
by semiotic processes we are shaped by them far more than we realise.
Pierre Guiraud goes further: 'Man [sic] is the vehicle and the substance
of the sign, he is both the signifier and the signified; in fact, he is a sign
and therefore a convention' (Guiraud 1975, 83). The postmodernist notion
of fragmented and shifting identities may provide a useful corrective to the
myth of the unified self. But unlike those postmodernist stances which simply
celebrate radical relativism, semiotics can help us to focus on how we
make sense of ourselves, whilst social semiotics anchors us to the study of
situated practices in the construction of identities and the part that our
engagement with sign systems plays in such processes. Justin Lewis notes that
'we are part of a prearranged semiological world. From the cradle to the grave,
we are encouraged by the shape of our environment to engage with the world of
signifiers in particular ways' (Lewis 1991, 30).
Guiraud, Pierre (1975): Semiology
(trans. George Gross). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Lewis, Justin (1991): The
Ideological Octopus: An Exploration of Television and its Audience. New
York: Routledge
Here is a little semiotic problem to be going on with:
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